If you want to take a dive into his grandparents side in Canada, specifically with his mother’s father Dr. Joshua Norman Haldeman, a former director of Technocracy Incorporated (American born, lived in Canadian prairies for many years and later moved to South Africa) … have a listen to this …

https://youtu.be/xO-JX-jASls

Same here … when I first saw it I was 50% laughing and 50% heart broken. I’ve made big pots of food before and this is my greatest fear … just walking around with it and dropping it all on the floor. I think of this scene every time I’m in the kitchen.

WE FOUND THE LEAK IN OUR ORGANIZATION!!!

They spilled the beans

True there are different types of poor and different types of people that see life as completely normal in any circumstances. We are all very adaptable creatures in whatever situation you place us in.

I grew up poor and I didn’t know it for about the first 10/15 years of my life. We had enough food but it was just that … enough … we never had extras, no snacks, no guilty pleasures. I have good teeth because I didn’t have the opportunity to eat a lot of junk food when I was younger which then led me to not really want it when I got older.

A lot of people around me were the same or similar … it was just the way things were and we were more or less just happy and content with it all. It was normal so there was nothing too upsetting about it. Unfortunately, not all families were as capable as ours. In a community full of people in the same boat, about half couldn’t do it and they fell into extreme poverty, addictions, bad health and just generally miserable lives. Then in my life, I started venturing out into the world and saw how wealthy everyone else was and I wanted to do the same but as a brown skinned Native person, the entire game was rigged against me … I couldn’t get schooling, I couldn’t find work, I wasn’t wanted, I wasn’t needed and I was just different. I had to work really hard to get anything. People also claim that my school could have been paid for but it only works when you work the system and are connected to everyone and everything in that system … I wasn’t and I had to fight my own leadership, my own community and the non-Native government about everything in order to get anything done. I barely scraped by and found work on my own, made a bit of money and barely made it to become an adult. Of all the family and friends I grew up that were like me … I think only about a quarter of us made it to something, a handful got post secondary and became lawyers and doctors or something important and the majority of the rest just ended up at home in varying levels of poverty from just getting by to literally living on the streets with small children. All in a situation where it is believed that we Native people get free money and have the world handed to us.

Money may not buy happiness but it sure helps and no matter how you frame it, poverty makes everything harder to do.

I keep having this and similar conversations with my wife and my friends and family …

The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.

The only difference is that us in the rich west have been recently affected and are facing a near future where our comfort and freedoms are going to be affected. We are starting to feel what the rest of the world has been feeling for a long, long time.

I say all this from the perspective of an Indigenous Canadian because I grew up poor and in a circumstance where me and my family were always made to feel less than the rest of the Canada.

Did not see that coming

We were on a Mediterranean cruise one year when we noticed there were a lot of Aussies on board. They were lots of fun and we didn’t realize until a few days in that they all wanted to pass Gallipoli for the April 25 commemoration. Met a bunch of middle aged men and women and their families who all had ancestors who were part of that famous and memorable campaign. It was eerie to sail past that area knowing that so many ancient battles were fought there and a modern one with descendents visiting this place.

I don’t drink (which the Aussies laughed about) and I could only toast with a glass of orange juice but I was more than happy to make friends with them and share me story of my grandfathers who fought in the same war but stationed in England and France.

When you make a Nazi salute and you’re an average person making less than $60,000 a year and barely making ends meet … you are a right wing extremist Nazi that is hated by the general public.

When you make a Nazi salute and you control over $400 billion … there is cause for debate and questions about whether or not it was a Nazi salute

… being SHIFTED to the right

Common every day people don’t consciously vote for or support right wing conservatives who won’t support people but instead build up the already massive wealth of massively wealthy people. If people could just see through all that crap, we’d have a different political landscape. But the means of communications are also owned and operated by those people who want a right wing shift. People don’t really want conservatism, especially in finance and social economics … they want a sharing of the wealth, a chance at making a bit of money, a chance at saving their money and in taking some of the excessive wealth from the wealthy who don’t need it and distributing it to everyone else. When you have a TV blaring at you, internet advertising, radio broadcasts, podcasts, marketing, newspapers, magazines telling you every single day and hour that conservatism is what you want … chances are that is what you will think.

Classic America … they love to live the fantasy of fighting against fascism and fighting for democracy and the common people in movies … but do the exact opposite in real life.

They treat doing the right thing like its some sort of fanciful make believe idea that only exists in movies, comics and fiction.

Funny you should mention that movie … I just finished watching ‘War Games’ with Matthew Broderick … those films just take me back to the 80s. It was a great time because everything was so simple … but like I said in my previous comment, it was also a rough period because the adults still lived in this world where they weren’t so easy on the kids. You could wander around town and if you did something … anything wrong, chances were high that you could run into an adult that could slap you around and if you told your parents, they’d ask YOU what you did wrong.

Doesn’t mean they had an easy life … I grew up surrounded by all my older relatives who looked like this when they were teenagers in the 80s. The thing was … they all had rough lives and basically childhood (if they had any) lasted about two or three years. Childhood was just never ending terror with rampant alcoholism, abuse at every corner and violent adults making your life miserable. Mix in there that you were expected to work, run errands, stay quiet or get slapped around for even existing. Most of the boys I knew had really rough fathers who beat them for even looking the wrong way … then they hit 12 years of age and almost by necessity, they had to grow up immediately. They had to grow old, tough, strong, fast and rough because they had to stand up to a previous generation that took it out on them. I remember my older cousin turning 13 and standing up to his dad in a fist fight. It was ugly but he stood his ground … neither won but he never got beat again.

It all just means a decade or two of crushing changes and enormous transfers of wealth to an elite few … it will be followed by a giant swing in the opposite direction after. How badly the swing back will be is anyone’s guess … it could be just an optimistic move back to social democratic values that actually tries to represent people … or just general revolt and conflict.

Whatever is going to happen, it’s going to be great if you’re already rich … but completely miserable if you’re not (even if you support these idiots and think that they will actually make anything other than their wealth great again)

I’m in Canada and I’ve never seen a nurse dressed like this.

The oldest memory I have of seeing a nurse is in seeing her look like an orderly at a mental hospital with white pants and shirt. I was eight years old screaming in pain when I had her pin me to the bed, while a second nurse set my broken leg. My family didn’t have to pay for it but it definitely did cost me a lifelong fear of nurses.

https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/mad/